Movie Review: The Report

The Report **** / *****

Directed by: Scott Z. Burns.

Written by: Scott Z. Burns.

Starring: Adam Driver (Daniel Jones), Annette Bening (Senator Dianne Feinstein), Jon Hamm (Denis McDonough), Linda Powell (Marcy Morris), Maura Tierney (Bernadette), Michael C. Hall (Thomas Eastman), Corey Stoll (Cyrus Clifford), John Rothman (Senator Sheldon Whitehouse), Guy Boyd (Senator Saxby Chambliss), Alexander Chaplin (Sean Murphy), Joanne Tucker (Gretchen), Dominic Fumusa (George Tenet), Sarah Goldberg (April), Fajer Al-Kaisi (Ali Soufan), Zuhdi Boueri (Abu Zubaydah), Douglas Hodge (James Mitchell), T. Ryder Smith (Bruce Jessen), Carlos Gómez (Jose Rodriguez), Tim Blake Nelson (Raymond Nathan), Ratnesh Dubey (Khaled Sheikh Muhammad), Ted Levine (John Brennan), Scott Shepherd (Senator Mark Udall), Daniel London (CIA Officer Fox), Jennifer Morrison (Caroline Krass), Matthew Rhys (New York Times Reporter), Kate Beahan (Candace Ames).

 

Scott Z. Burns The Report probably shouldn’t well as well as it does. Hell, it shouldn’t really work at all. This is a film after all about one man’s obsessive quest to get the bottom of what the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques used in the wake of 9/11 actually meant, what they did and what they learned, if anything, as a result of these interrogations. But Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) isn’t a journalist – he works for the Senate Intelligence Committee, specifically for Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) – and we learn early on that the CIA will make no one available for interviews. Instead, Driver and his team – first with five other people, soon down to two – will essentially spend five years in a dank room in the CIA basement, going through document after document, and piecing together what exactly the CIA did, in their own words, and figuring out how different that is than what the CIA has said publicly. The Report really is a movie about data. How do you make data exciting?

 

Burns is able to do it in a few ways. For one, it helps to have an actor like Driver in the central performance here – an actor who make anything look interesting, and seemingly equally comfortable staring at a computer as when he has to deliver some long, data dump speeches in the film, that play like less inspirational Aaron Sorkin monologues. Like Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac, Driver is essentially playing a character whose entire life is contained in a room – in all the documents he spends years reading. He starts to look paler and paler as the movie goes on – even as his blood temperature rises.

 

For another, Burns is not above some more dramatic flashbacks. As Driver reads what was done, we do flash to the CIA black sites where the enhanced interrogation techniques were being used, under the eye of two psychologists who don’t know what they are doing – Mitchell and Jessen (Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith), who relationship with each other would almost be comically inept, except it involved torturing people. There are other faces we start to recognize – like Maura Tierney as a CIA agent there, also overseeing the interrogations, who seems to realize before Mitchell and Jessen that their works isn’t getting them anywhere, but keeps right on going along with it anyway. The CIA is mad in the wake of 9/11 – mad that they didn’t stop it, and they want revenge. And with the Bush White House giving them cover – they find it.

 

Yet while The Report clearly has no lost for the Bush years, and takes shot at the fictional and not so fictional depictions of Enhanced Interrogation on display – Jones explicitly references 24 as something they have to work against, and sighs deeply when a commercial for Zero Dark Thirty comes on TV, what is more surprising perhaps is how critical the film is of the Obama Whitehouse. Most of the film takes places during the Obama years – either in the first term, or leading up to the second term – and Obama and company don’t seem too interested in getting this information out to the public either. Obama is trying to look post partisan (didn’t work) and doesn’t want to be seen as attacking Bush. Besides, this is over – it’s in the past, and no one wants to hear it. They got Bin Laden, why not turn the page and move on. Jones of course thinks differently – you cannot confront what was done until people know what it was, in all its details.

 

Really, The Report shouldn’t work. Yes, it has a lot of talented actors supporting Driver – Bening doesn’t really do a Feinstein impression, but she’s good just the same. As is Jon Hamm as an Obama aid, and Ted Levine as the head of the CIA, and various other character actors who show up in minor roles. But the film is basically one big data dump for two hours. We learn nothing about any of the people as people – beyond their job, and what they are doing to either help or hinder Jones. And yet the film is engrossing – even exciting – from beginning to end. I don’t know how many will watch The Report – audiences seemed not to care about these types of movies when Hollywood tried making them a decade ago. But they should watch The Report. In order to move forward, we have to know what happened in the past.